Portable electronic devices (e.g. phones, laptops, tablet, etc.) have become more sophisticated. Today, a user may retrieve, view, edit, or otherwise interact with content at a portable electronic device. However, there are some forms of content that may be difficult to view on a display screen of a portable electronic device. For example, if a portable electronic device has a small display, the content may be reduced in size, truncated, or redacted to fit in the area available on the display screen. If the display area available on a portable electronic device is too small to effectively display the content, a user may desire to view the content on a different device that has a larger display area, such as a tablet, laptop, television, kiosk screen, and the like.
A user might email to himself a link (e.g. Uniform Resource Locator, URL) to the content and then open the email on the different device. Alternatively, a user may save the content on the portable electronic device, connect the portable electronic device to a computer via a USB (Universal Serial Bus) cable, and then operate the computer to retrieve the content from the portable electronic device. Even for a sophisticated user, these approaches may be cumbersome and unnecessarily time consuming. Some portable electronic devices are equipped with video-out ports, such as VGA (Video Graphics Array), HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface), or other known video output interfaces. The portable electronic device may use these video output interfaces to generate a video output at the portable electronic device for display to a connected display or television.
In one approach, a computer may generate a video output using a graphics controller at the computer and then transmit the generated video output via a network protocol to another machine that simply displays the generated video output. These types of technologies have been referred to as a “remote desktop,” or “virtual desktop.” For example, a host computer may run a host application which communicates with a corresponding client application at a client machine. Typically, the communications connection between host application and client application is based upon a proprietary protocol and may use a non-standard TCP port address at the host computer network interface. The host computer utilizes a graphics processor at the host computer to generate visual output data that is sent to the client machine. A person of skill in the art would recognize this category of prior art by well-known monikers, such as Windows™ Remote Assistance, Citrix™ GoToMyPC™, and the like. The “remote desktop” approach requires graphics processing resources at the host computer to generate the video output, even though a user is “interacting” with the content at the machine that displays the video output. In addition to utilizing resources at the host computer, this may cause latency or user interface lag for a user interacting with the content at the client machine.
In very recent developments, some companies have promoted a proprietary approach that includes specialized software at a first device and at a second device for allowing the one device to control the other. For example, if you have a “Company-A” computer and a “Company-A” mobile phone, the computer and the mobile phone may be equipped with proprietary protocols for sending files between the two machines. A problem with this approach is that the protocols may be specific to transferring files, rather than addressing a need to interact with files at one or both machines. Furthermore, endpoints of the proprietary protocol may be so tightly embedded in the operating system that they become cumbersome to upgrade or maintain among the plurality of devices that a typical user may wish to use as technology develops. This technology may be referred to as “remote control” approach. Upon selection at a client machine, a command is sent by a client application to a corresponding host application to playback a selected media file using a media player at the host computer. In this approach, the client machine operates as a remote control to remotely operate the media player at the host computer. The “remote control” approach requires that the client application be programmatically linked to the commands associated with the media player. Furthermore, the remote control applications make assumptions about the types and locations of the media content. These approaches tend to be single-purpose applications with limited ability to transfer direct control over a content item from one machine to another machine.
Near Field Communication (NFC) has been used in some approaches, to coordinate data between two devices. NFC may be used to playback media content from a master device to one of a plurality of slave devices, and may also be used for a “bumping” approach in which short range radio technology is used to transfer information between two portable electronic devices. For example, a first electronic device may have a NFC transceiver. When the first electronic device is brought into close proximity to a second electronic device, the NFC transceiver is capable of transmitting short range radio frequency transmissions to a NFC transceiver at the second electronic device. The process of bringing the electronic devices close enough for the NFC transmissions may be referred to as “bumping,” “tapping,” or “touching.” In one approach, when the first electronic device is bumped with the second electronic device, a URL of a web page may be transmitted via the NFC transmission to the second electronic device. The second electronic device may then display the web page using a browser at the second electronic device. The bumping approach has distance and bandwidth limitations associated with short-range radio frequency. Furthermore, if the content is stored at the first electronic device, then the second electronic device may need to be kept in very close proximity to the first electronic device in order to properly transfer the content. Depending on the technology used for short-range radio frequency communication (such as NFC), the bandwidth between the devices may be limited.